The Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning has created a new program to fund research that specifically focuses on supporting graduate students in mentoring undergraduates, said Kathy Takayama, executive director of the Sheridan Center.
The program, entitled “The Principles and Practice in Reflective Mentorship Initiative,” was organized by Takayama and Neal Fox GS, a graduate student in the department of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, and reflects the Sheridan Center’s theme for this academic year — mentorship, Takayama said.
Undergraduate and graduate students will work together to apply for one of two types of projects — “Research Partnership” projects or “Community of Practice” projects, Takayama said. Research partnerships involve one undergraduate and one graduate student working together on research related to the graduate student’s thesis, while “Community of Practice” projects involve one or more graduate student mentors leading up to four undergraduates in broader projects like research skill development or reading groups, Takayama said.
“We tried to make this a flexible program for the first iteration. We want to see what kinds of projects people come up with,” Fox said.
Takayama emphasized that the program is open to students in all disciplines, adding that humanities students are “particularly interested” in the initiative because they have fewer opportunities than students in the sciences to work directly with graduate mentors.
Research partners can apply for up to $5,000 in funding, while “Community of Practice” teams can apply for up to $7,000, Takayama said.
Four groups will be chosen for the program, she said, though she and Fox said they expect more will apply.
No new grant is funding the initiative — instead, funds will come from the Sheridan Center’s budget, Takayama said.
“We would love to be able to expand the program, but the funding would have to continue,” Takayama said.
Applications are due Sept. 30. A selection committee will meet in mid-October to determine which groups will receive funding, Takayama said.
The committee will comprise seven faculty members from different disciplines, Fox said.
Once the groups are chosen, mentors and mentees will begin meeting in late October, Takayama said.
Fox was inspired to create a graduate-undergraduate mentoring program by one, the “Double Hoo Fellowship,” that existed at his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Virginia.
But Fox wrote in an email to The Herald that the University of Virginia program “was not designed to train good mentors so much as to provide the opportunity for mentoring to take place. In that sense the program lacked follow-through.”
“The graduate students didn’t get any coaching about how to be a better mentor and how to help undergraduates develop as researchers and thinkers,” Fox said.
Fox worked with Takayama for over a year to develop Brown’s version of the program, coming to the conclusion that there are many alternative mentorship models to the sometimes sub-optimal one-on-one model.
“There’s a special opportunity to do this at Brown because Brown is so focused on undergraduate education,” he said.
Fox will meet separately with graduate and undergraduate students over the course of the program to address challenges, he said. Graduate students will also attend roundtable discussions with faculty members on topics like “Balancing Life and Scholarship,” “Inclusive Mentoring” and “Building a Community,” Fox wrote in an e-mail to the Herald.
Xuan Zhao GS said she plans to apply for a research partnership with Baxter DiFabrizio ’14.5 through the new program. “I want to learn how to be a successful mentor myself,” Zhao said, adding that she has benefited from many mentors over her time as a student.
DiFabrizio plans to help Zhao run studies and analyze data for her research on “perspective taking” in the cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences department.
“The idea is to produce something better than if the graduate student had done it on her own,” said Bertram Malle, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences and Zhao’s doctoral advisor.
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